By rewarding growth, schools are incentivized to prevent earlier grades from doing too well.
One student with potential pushing the overall performance higher than that school might like for that year might be purposefully stunted in order to allow room for growth in later years, robbing them of getting as far in life as they would have.
I’m not sure it would work like how you are proposing, since purposely stunting a student would penalize the school exactly as much as they would “gain” as the student catches back up.
Give the kids 3 standards referenced tests a year; one is referenced to the school district, one to the state, and one to the nation. Give all 3 exams in a week when they do nothing else. This gives us better test results than a single exam on a single day.
Because the state tests are now optional they are less influential as inputs for future years (almost by definition), and/or alterantive pathways and rubrics must (and are) provided which further dilute their effectiveness.
It's a tricky and complicated situation, and obviously school districts, states and even the federal government are all trying out different ideas.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=valu...
Growth measures do exist, but they require adaptive tests.
However, state tests are annual. You don't want to measure the same thing. If you don't measure the same thing, you can't compare.
There are technically non-adaptive test designs which might work, but it's not what we're using, and they're a lot more complex than adaptive.
Also, the SBAC test administered in California, Washington, and many others is now adaptive, but still schools are measured based on point-in-time aggregates.
The short story is that most states assessments are designed almost as binary measures, to see if students are above or below a cutoff threshold set by Common Core State Standards. They're designed to measure schools, and in particular, to flag failing schools where kids aren't meeting standards.
They're very good at that, actually.
However, that's almost meaningless as a measure for kids well above or below standards, or unaligned to standards.
"Growth" is almost meaningless here. If I know one number is less than three and another less than four, I can't subtract them.
It's more mathematically fancy, but that's the jist. It gets even worse since measures constructs are highly multidimensional and different dimensions are measured each year. It's like subtracting apples from oranges.
It also encourages the wrong behavior. For kids behind, I'll get the best "growth" by discussing on grade level material and leaving gaps for what kids failed to learn before. I'll also do well to ignore my students who are ahead. Indeed, students who did week last year will inevitably hurt my "growth."
As a footnote, I would not call this a strong claim. Talk to a psychometrician and you'll see it's common knowledge.
If adaptive tests move beyond those few states, the problem goes away.
My adult kids love to look back to see how tall they were when they were 10 years old.
Instead of measuring schools how about we pay teachers more and demand decent education.
All this measuring! Measuring, measuring, measuring.
What a waste of time and money.
Yes, but with 125k schools in the US and 3.5 million teachers, how do you determine which of them are providing a decent education?
Systematically comparing schools on any metric accomplishes nothing. And every year for decades we act like we just need to identify the good schools and replicate their success, with literally actual regard given to what makes schools successful in the first place: functioning administration, involved parents, good and stable teachers. After that, curriculum and resources.
And a functioning administration is generally what gets sacrified first in pursuit of some across the board improvement in some flavor of the week metric.
